Provocative article. I agree that philosophers should be reading Pearl and Kahneman. I even agree that philosophers should spend more time with Pearl and Kahneman (and lots of other contemporary thinkers) than they do with Plato and Kant. But then, that pretty much describes my own graduate training in philosophy. And it describes the graduate training (at a very different school) received by many of the students in the department where I now teach. I recognize that my experience may be unusual, but I wonder if philosophy and philosophical training really are the way you think they are.
Bearing in mind that my own experiences may be quite unusual, I present some musings on the article nonetheless:
(1) You seem to think that philosophical training involves a lot of Aristotelian ideas (see your entries for “pre-1980 theories of causation” and “term logic”). In my philosophical education, including as an undergraduate, I took two courses that were explicitly concerned with Aristotle. Both of them were explicitly labeled as “history of philosophy” courses. Students are sometimes taught bits of Aristotelian (and Medieval) syllogistic, but those ideas are never, so far as I know, the main things taught in logic (as opposed to history) courses. In the freshman-level logic course that I teach, we build a natural deduction system up through first-order logic (with identity), plus a bit of simplified axiomatic set theory (extensionality, an axiom for the empty set instead of the axiom of comprehension, pairing, union, and power set), and a bit of probability theory for finite sample spaces (since I’m not allowed to assume that freshmen have had calculus). We cover Aristotle’s logic in less than one lecture, as a note on categorical sentences when we get to first-order logic. And really, we only do that because it is useful to see that “Some Ss are Ps” is the negation of “No Ss are Ps,” before thinking about how to solve probability problems like finding the probability of at least one six in three tosses of a fair die. Critical thinking courses are almost always service courses directed at non-philosophers.
(2) You seem to think that philosophers do a lot of conceptual analysis, rather than empirical work. In my own philosophy education, I was told that conceptual analysis does not work and that with perhaps the exception of Tarski’s analysis of logical consequence, there have been no successful conceptual analyses of philosophically interesting concepts. Moreover, I had several classes—classes where the concern was with how people think (either in general or about specific things) -- where we paid attention to contemporary psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience. In fact, restricting attention to material assigned in philosophy classes I have taken, you would find more Kahneman and Tversky than you would Plato or Kant. And you would also find a lot of other psychologists and cognitive scientists, including Gopnik, Cheng, Penn, Povinelli, Sloman, Wolff, Marr, Gibson, Damasio, and so on and so forth. Graduate students in my department are generally distrustful of their own intuitions and look for empirical ways to get at concepts (when they even care about concepts). For example, one excellent student in my department, Zach Horne, has been thinking a bit about the analysis of knowledge (which is by no means the central problem in contemporary epistemology), but he’s attacking the problem via experiments involving semantic integration. And I’ve done my own experimental work on the analysis of knowledge, though the experiments were not as clever.
(3) You seem to think that philosophy before 1980 (why that date??) is not sufficiently connected to actual science to be worth reading, and that this is mostly what philosophers read. Both are, I think, incorrect claims.
With respect to the first claim, there is lots of philosophical work before 1980 that is both closely engaged with contemporaneous science and amazingly useful to read. Take a look at Carnap’s article on “Testability and Meaning,” or his book on The Logical Foundations of Probability. Read through Reichenbach’s book on The Direction of Time. These books definitely repay close reading. All of Russell’s work was written before 1980 -- since he died in 1970! Wittgenstein’s later work is enormously useful for preventing unnecessary disputes about words, but it was written before 1980. This shouldn’t be surprising. After all, lots of scientific, mathematical, and statistical work from before 1980 is well worth reading today. Lots of the heuristics and biases literature from the ’70s is still great to read. Savage’s Foundations of Statistics is definitely worth reading today. As is lots of material from de Finetti, Good, Turing, Wright, Neyman, Simon, and many others. Feynman’s The Character of Physical Law was a lecture series delivered in 1960. Is it past its expiration date? It’s not the place to go for cutting edge physics, but I would highly recommend it as reading for an undergraduate. I might assign a chunk of it in my undergraduate philosophy of science course next semester. (Unless you convince me it’s a really, really bad idea.) Why think that philosophical work ages worse than scientific work?
With respect to the second claim, you might be right with respect to undergraduate education. On the other hand, undergraduate physics education isn’t a whole lot better (if any), is it? But with respect to graduate training, it seems to me that if one is interested in contemporary problems, rather than caring about the history of ideas, one reads primarily contemporary philosophers. In a typical philosophy course on causation, I would guess you read more of David Lewis than anyone. But that’s not so bad, since Lewis’ ideas are very closely connected to Pearl on the one hand and the dominant approaches to causal inference in statistics on the other. The syllabus and reading lists for the graduate seminar on causation that I am just wrapping up teaching are here, in case you want to see the way I approach teaching the topic. I’ll just note that in my smallish seminar (about eight people—six enrolled for credit) two people are writing on decision theory, two are writing on how to use causal Bayes nets to do counterfactual reasoning, and one is writing on the contextual unanimity requirement in probabilistic accounts of causation. Only one person is doing what might be considered an historical project.
Rather than giving a very artificial cut-off date, it seems to me we ought to be reading good philosophy from whenever it comes. Sometimes, that will mean reading old-but-good work from Bacon or Boole or (yes) Kant or Peirce or Carnap. And that is okay.
(4) You seem to endorse Glymour’s recommendation that philosophy departments be judged based on the external funding they pull in. On the other hand, you say there should be less philosophical work (or training at least) on free will. As I pointed out the first time you mentioned Glymour’s manifesto, there is more than a little tension here, since work on free will (which you and I and probably Glymour don’t care about) does get external funding. (In any event, this is more than a little odd, since it typically isn’t the way funding of university departments works in the humanities, anyway, where most funding is tied to teaching rather than to research and where most salaries are pathetically small in comparison with STEM counterparts.) Where I really agree with Glymour is in thinking that philosophy departments ought to be shelter for iconoclasts. But in that case, philosophy should be understood to be the discipline that houses the weirdos. We should then keep a look-out for good ideas coming from philosophy, since those rare gems are often worth quite a lot, but we also shouldn’t panic when the discipline looks like it’s run by a bunch of weirdos. In fact, I think this is pretty close to being exactly what contemporary philosophy actually is as a discipline.
I’m sure I could say a lot more, but this comment is already excessively long. Perhaps the take-away should be this. Set aside the question of how philosophy is taught now. I am receptive to teaching philosophy in a better way. I want the best minds to be studying and doing philosophy. (And if I can’t get that, then I would at least like the best minds to see that there is value in doing philosophy even if they decide to spend their effort elsewhere.) If I can pull in the best people by learning and teaching more artificial intelligence or statistics or whatever, I’m game. I teach a lot of that now, but even if I didn’t, I hope I would be more interested in inspiring people to learn and think and push civilization forward than in business as usual.
EDIT: I guess markdown language didn’t like my numbering scheme. (I really wish we had a preview window for comments.)
But then, that pretty much describes my own graduate training in philosophy.
You did indeed have an unusual philosophical training. In fact, the head of your dissertation committee was a co-author with Glymour on the work that Pearl built on with Causality.
You seem to think that philosophical training involves a lot of Aristotelian ideas
Not really. Term logic is my only mention of Aristotle, and I know that philosophy departments focus on first-order logic and not term logic these days. Your training was not unusual in this matter. First-order logic training is good, which is why I said there should be more of it (as part of mathematical logic).
In my own philosophy education, I was told that conceptual analysis does not work and that with perhaps the exception of Tarski’s analysis of logical consequence, there have been no successful conceptual analyses of philosophically interesting concepts.
Good, but this is not the norm. Machery was also on your dissertation committee; the author of Doing Without Concepts, a book I’ve previously endorsed to some degree.
1980 that is both closely engaged with contemporaneous science and amazingly useful to read
Of course. There are a few shining exemplars of scientific, formal philosophy prioer to 1980. That’s what I recommended philosophers be trained with “less” pre-1980s stuff, not “no” pre-1980s stuff.
The head of your dissertation committee was a co-author with Glymour on the work that Pearl built on with Causality.
I was, in fact, aware of that. ;)
In the grand scheme of things, I may have had an odd education. However, it’s not like I’m the only student that Glymour, Spirtes, Machery, and many of my other teachers have had. Basically every student who went through Pitt HPS or CMU’s Philosophy Department had the same or deeper exposure to psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, causal Bayes nets, confirmation theory, etc. Either that, or they got an enormous helping of algebraic quantum field theory, gauge theory, and other philosophy of physics stuff.
You might argue that these are very unusual departments, and I am inclined to agree with you. But only weakly. If you look at Michigan or Rutgers, you find lots of people doing excellent work in decision theory, confirmation theory, philosophy of physics, philosophy of cognitive science, experimental philosophy, etc. A cluster of schools in the New York area—all pretty highly ranked—do the same things. So do schools in California, like Stanford, UC Irvine, and UCSD. My rough estimate is that 20-25% of all philosophical education at schools in Leiter’s Top 25 is pretty similar to mine. Not a majority, but not a small chunk, either, given how much of philosophy is devoted to ethics. That is, of course, just an educated guess. I don’t have a data-driven analysis of what philosophical training looks like, but then neither do you. Hence, I think we should be cautious about making sweeping claims about what philosophical training looks like. It might not look the way you think it looks, and from the inside, it doesn’t seem to look the way you say it looks. Data are needed if we want to say anything with any kind of confidence.
Term logic is my only mention of Aristotle.
Your pre-1980s causation link goes to a subsection of the wiki on causality, which subsection is on Aristotle’s theory of causation. The rest of the article is so ill-organized that I couldn’t tell which things you meant to be pointing to. So, I defaulted to “Whatever the link first takes me to,” which was Aristotle. Maybe you thought it went somewhere else or meant to be pointing to something else?
Anyway, I know I have a tendency only to criticize, where I should also be flagging agreement. I agree with a lot of what you’re saying here and elsewhere. Don’t forget that you have allies in establishment philosophy.
You might be right that I’m reading too much into what you’ve written. However, I suspect (especially given the other comments in this thread and the comments on the reddit thread) that the reading “Philosophy is overwhelmingly bad and should be killed with fire,” is the one that readers are most likely to actually give to what you’ve written. I don’t know whether there is a good way to both (a) make the points you want to make about improving philosophy education and (b) make the stronger reading unlikely.
I’m curious: if you couldn’t have your whole mega-course (which seems more like the basis for a degree program than the basis for a single course, really), what one or two concrete course offerings would you want to see in every philosophy program? I ask because while I may not be able to change my whole department, I do have some freedom in which courses I teach and how I teach them. If you are planning to cover this in more detail in upcoming posts, feel free to ignore the question here.
Also, I did understand what you were up to with the Spirtes reference, I just thought it was funny. I tried to imagine what the world would have had to be like for me to have been surprised by finding out that Spirtes was the lead author on Causation, Prediction, and Search, and that made me smile.
I don’t know whether there is a good way to both (a) make the points you want to make about improving philosophy education and (b) make the stronger reading unlikely.
Yes; hopefully I can do better in my next post.
if you couldn’t have your whole mega-course, …what one or two concrete course offerings would you want to see in every philosophy program?
One course I’d want in every philosophy curriculum would be something like “The Science of Changing Your Mind,” based on the more epistemically-focused stuff that CFAR is learning how to teach to people. This course offering doesn’t exist yet, but if it did then it would be a course which has people drill the particular skills involved in Not Fooling Oneself. You know, teachable rationality skills: be specific, avoid motivated cognition, get curious, etc. — but after we’ve figured out how to teach these things effectively, and aren’t just guessing at which exercises might be effective. (Why this? Because Philosophy Needs to Trust Your Rationality Even Though It Shouldn’t.)
Though it doesn’t yet exist, if such a course sounds as helpful to you as it does to me, then you could of course try to work with CFAR and other interested parties to try to develop such a course. CFAR is already working with Nobel laureate Saul Perlmutter at Berkeley to develop some kind of course on rationality, though I don’t have the details. I know CFAR president Julia Galef is particularly passionate about the relevance of trainable rationality skills to successful philosophical practice.
What about courses that could e.g. be run from existing textbooks? It is difficult to suggest entry-level courses that would be useful. Aaronson’s course Philosophy and Theoretical Computer Science could be good, but it seems to require significant background in computability and complexity theory.
One candidate might be a course in probability theory and its implications for philosophy of science — the kind of material covered in the early chapters of Koller & Friedman (2009) and then Howson & Urbach (2005) (or, more briefly, Yudwkosky 2005).
Another candidate would be a course on experimental philosophy, perhaps expanding on Alexander (2012).
Though it doesn’t yet exist, if such a course sounds as helpful to you as it does to me, then you could of course try to work with CFAR and other interested parties to try to develop such a course.
I am interested. Should I contact Julia directly or is there something else I should do in order to get involved?
Also, since you mention Alexander’s book, let me make a shameless plug here: Justin Sytsma and I just finished a draft of our own introduction to experimental philosophy, which is under contract with Broadview and should be in print in the next year or so.
Though it doesn’t yet exist, if such a course sounds as helpful to you as it does to me, then you could of course try to work with CFAR and other interested parties to try to develop such a course.
Is this an open invitation? Because such a course sounds even more helpful to me than it does to you, I suspect. I probably have a lot of catching up, learning and de-corrupting to do on myself before I’m at a level that would be useful rather than waste CFAR’s* time, though.
As a point of reference, I’ve recently been shifting my life goals towards the objective of reducing and understanding “knowledge” and “expertise” as quantifiable, reduced atomic units that can be discussed, acquired and evaluated on the same level of detail and precision as, say, electronic equipment or construction machinery is currently for IT businesses or construction contractors.
I suspect my best path towards this is through an in-depth analytic study of inferential distance and the interlocking of concepts into ideas, and how this could be fully reduced into units of knowledge and information such that it would always be clear, visible and obvious to a tutor exactly which specific units are required to get from A to B on a certain topic, and easy to evaluate which one is lacking in a student.
However, while people are often impressed with just the above statements, I cringe at the fact that I can only say it, and am only grasping at straws and vague mental handles when trying to make sense out of it and actually work on the problem. And it feels almost like an applause light to say this to you, but it seems like everything in this area is… just… going… too… slow… and that really bugs me a lot.
* and those “other interested parties” (Who are they, if you know any examples?)
Of course, you may always contact CFAR about such things. Whether it goes any further than that will vary.
As for “other interested parties,” I recall coming across philosophy and psychology professors who wanted to develop CFAR-like courses for university students, but I don’t recall who they are.
But in that case, philosophy should be understood to be the discipline that houses the weirdos. We should then keep a look-out for good ideas coming from philosophy, since those rare gems are often worth quite a lot, but we also shouldn’t panic when the discipline looks like it’s run by a bunch of weirdos. In fact, I think this is pretty close to being exactly what contemporary philosophy actually is as a discipline.
I particularly agree with this part. The project of regimenting philosophy to conform to someone’s ideas of correctness or meaningfullness or worth isn’t just objectionably illiberal, although it is, it is counterporductive, because you
need some disciple that houses the weirdos. If none of them do, then those leftfield ideas are going to slip
through the cracks.
Provocative article. I agree that philosophers should be reading Pearl and Kahneman. I even agree that philosophers should spend more time with Pearl and Kahneman (and lots of other contemporary thinkers) than they do with Plato and Kant. But then, that pretty much describes my own graduate training in philosophy. And it describes the graduate training (at a very different school) received by many of the students in the department where I now teach. I recognize that my experience may be unusual, but I wonder if philosophy and philosophical training really are the way you think they are.
Bearing in mind that my own experiences may be quite unusual, I present some musings on the article nonetheless:
(1) You seem to think that philosophical training involves a lot of Aristotelian ideas (see your entries for “pre-1980 theories of causation” and “term logic”). In my philosophical education, including as an undergraduate, I took two courses that were explicitly concerned with Aristotle. Both of them were explicitly labeled as “history of philosophy” courses. Students are sometimes taught bits of Aristotelian (and Medieval) syllogistic, but those ideas are never, so far as I know, the main things taught in logic (as opposed to history) courses. In the freshman-level logic course that I teach, we build a natural deduction system up through first-order logic (with identity), plus a bit of simplified axiomatic set theory (extensionality, an axiom for the empty set instead of the axiom of comprehension, pairing, union, and power set), and a bit of probability theory for finite sample spaces (since I’m not allowed to assume that freshmen have had calculus). We cover Aristotle’s logic in less than one lecture, as a note on categorical sentences when we get to first-order logic. And really, we only do that because it is useful to see that “Some Ss are Ps” is the negation of “No Ss are Ps,” before thinking about how to solve probability problems like finding the probability of at least one six in three tosses of a fair die. Critical thinking courses are almost always service courses directed at non-philosophers.
(2) You seem to think that philosophers do a lot of conceptual analysis, rather than empirical work. In my own philosophy education, I was told that conceptual analysis does not work and that with perhaps the exception of Tarski’s analysis of logical consequence, there have been no successful conceptual analyses of philosophically interesting concepts. Moreover, I had several classes—classes where the concern was with how people think (either in general or about specific things) -- where we paid attention to contemporary psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience. In fact, restricting attention to material assigned in philosophy classes I have taken, you would find more Kahneman and Tversky than you would Plato or Kant. And you would also find a lot of other psychologists and cognitive scientists, including Gopnik, Cheng, Penn, Povinelli, Sloman, Wolff, Marr, Gibson, Damasio, and so on and so forth. Graduate students in my department are generally distrustful of their own intuitions and look for empirical ways to get at concepts (when they even care about concepts). For example, one excellent student in my department, Zach Horne, has been thinking a bit about the analysis of knowledge (which is by no means the central problem in contemporary epistemology), but he’s attacking the problem via experiments involving semantic integration. And I’ve done my own experimental work on the analysis of knowledge, though the experiments were not as clever.
(3) You seem to think that philosophy before 1980 (why that date??) is not sufficiently connected to actual science to be worth reading, and that this is mostly what philosophers read. Both are, I think, incorrect claims.
With respect to the first claim, there is lots of philosophical work before 1980 that is both closely engaged with contemporaneous science and amazingly useful to read. Take a look at Carnap’s article on “Testability and Meaning,” or his book on The Logical Foundations of Probability. Read through Reichenbach’s book on The Direction of Time. These books definitely repay close reading. All of Russell’s work was written before 1980 -- since he died in 1970! Wittgenstein’s later work is enormously useful for preventing unnecessary disputes about words, but it was written before 1980. This shouldn’t be surprising. After all, lots of scientific, mathematical, and statistical work from before 1980 is well worth reading today. Lots of the heuristics and biases literature from the ’70s is still great to read. Savage’s Foundations of Statistics is definitely worth reading today. As is lots of material from de Finetti, Good, Turing, Wright, Neyman, Simon, and many others. Feynman’s The Character of Physical Law was a lecture series delivered in 1960. Is it past its expiration date? It’s not the place to go for cutting edge physics, but I would highly recommend it as reading for an undergraduate. I might assign a chunk of it in my undergraduate philosophy of science course next semester. (Unless you convince me it’s a really, really bad idea.) Why think that philosophical work ages worse than scientific work?
With respect to the second claim, you might be right with respect to undergraduate education. On the other hand, undergraduate physics education isn’t a whole lot better (if any), is it? But with respect to graduate training, it seems to me that if one is interested in contemporary problems, rather than caring about the history of ideas, one reads primarily contemporary philosophers. In a typical philosophy course on causation, I would guess you read more of David Lewis than anyone. But that’s not so bad, since Lewis’ ideas are very closely connected to Pearl on the one hand and the dominant approaches to causal inference in statistics on the other. The syllabus and reading lists for the graduate seminar on causation that I am just wrapping up teaching are here, in case you want to see the way I approach teaching the topic. I’ll just note that in my smallish seminar (about eight people—six enrolled for credit) two people are writing on decision theory, two are writing on how to use causal Bayes nets to do counterfactual reasoning, and one is writing on the contextual unanimity requirement in probabilistic accounts of causation. Only one person is doing what might be considered an historical project.
Rather than giving a very artificial cut-off date, it seems to me we ought to be reading good philosophy from whenever it comes. Sometimes, that will mean reading old-but-good work from Bacon or Boole or (yes) Kant or Peirce or Carnap. And that is okay.
(4) You seem to endorse Glymour’s recommendation that philosophy departments be judged based on the external funding they pull in. On the other hand, you say there should be less philosophical work (or training at least) on free will. As I pointed out the first time you mentioned Glymour’s manifesto, there is more than a little tension here, since work on free will (which you and I and probably Glymour don’t care about) does get external funding. (In any event, this is more than a little odd, since it typically isn’t the way funding of university departments works in the humanities, anyway, where most funding is tied to teaching rather than to research and where most salaries are pathetically small in comparison with STEM counterparts.) Where I really agree with Glymour is in thinking that philosophy departments ought to be shelter for iconoclasts. But in that case, philosophy should be understood to be the discipline that houses the weirdos. We should then keep a look-out for good ideas coming from philosophy, since those rare gems are often worth quite a lot, but we also shouldn’t panic when the discipline looks like it’s run by a bunch of weirdos. In fact, I think this is pretty close to being exactly what contemporary philosophy actually is as a discipline.
I’m sure I could say a lot more, but this comment is already excessively long. Perhaps the take-away should be this. Set aside the question of how philosophy is taught now. I am receptive to teaching philosophy in a better way. I want the best minds to be studying and doing philosophy. (And if I can’t get that, then I would at least like the best minds to see that there is value in doing philosophy even if they decide to spend their effort elsewhere.) If I can pull in the best people by learning and teaching more artificial intelligence or statistics or whatever, I’m game. I teach a lot of that now, but even if I didn’t, I hope I would be more interested in inspiring people to learn and think and push civilization forward than in business as usual.
EDIT: I guess markdown language didn’t like my numbering scheme. (I really wish we had a preview window for comments.)
You did indeed have an unusual philosophical training. In fact, the head of your dissertation committee was a co-author with Glymour on the work that Pearl built on with Causality.
Not really. Term logic is my only mention of Aristotle, and I know that philosophy departments focus on first-order logic and not term logic these days. Your training was not unusual in this matter. First-order logic training is good, which is why I said there should be more of it (as part of mathematical logic).
Good, but this is not the norm. Machery was also on your dissertation committee; the author of Doing Without Concepts, a book I’ve previously endorsed to some degree.
Of course. There are a few shining exemplars of scientific, formal philosophy prioer to 1980. That’s what I recommended philosophers be trained with “less” pre-1980s stuff, not “no” pre-1980s stuff.
I was, in fact, aware of that. ;)
In the grand scheme of things, I may have had an odd education. However, it’s not like I’m the only student that Glymour, Spirtes, Machery, and many of my other teachers have had. Basically every student who went through Pitt HPS or CMU’s Philosophy Department had the same or deeper exposure to psychology, cognitive science, neuroscience, causal Bayes nets, confirmation theory, etc. Either that, or they got an enormous helping of algebraic quantum field theory, gauge theory, and other philosophy of physics stuff.
You might argue that these are very unusual departments, and I am inclined to agree with you. But only weakly. If you look at Michigan or Rutgers, you find lots of people doing excellent work in decision theory, confirmation theory, philosophy of physics, philosophy of cognitive science, experimental philosophy, etc. A cluster of schools in the New York area—all pretty highly ranked—do the same things. So do schools in California, like Stanford, UC Irvine, and UCSD. My rough estimate is that 20-25% of all philosophical education at schools in Leiter’s Top 25 is pretty similar to mine. Not a majority, but not a small chunk, either, given how much of philosophy is devoted to ethics. That is, of course, just an educated guess. I don’t have a data-driven analysis of what philosophical training looks like, but then neither do you. Hence, I think we should be cautious about making sweeping claims about what philosophical training looks like. It might not look the way you think it looks, and from the inside, it doesn’t seem to look the way you say it looks. Data are needed if we want to say anything with any kind of confidence.
Your pre-1980s causation link goes to a subsection of the wiki on causality, which subsection is on Aristotle’s theory of causation. The rest of the article is so ill-organized that I couldn’t tell which things you meant to be pointing to. So, I defaulted to “Whatever the link first takes me to,” which was Aristotle. Maybe you thought it went somewhere else or meant to be pointing to something else?
Anyway, I know I have a tendency only to criticize, where I should also be flagging agreement. I agree with a lot of what you’re saying here and elsewhere. Don’t forget that you have allies in establishment philosophy.
Of course. I said it for the benefit of others. But I guess I should have said “As I’m sure you know...”
I think you might be reading too much into what I’ve claimed in my article. I said things like:
“Not all philosophy is this bad, but much of it is bad enough...” (not, e.g. “most philosophy is this bad”)
“you’ll find that [these classes] spend a lot of time with...” (not, e.g., “spend most of their time with...”)
“More X… less Y...” (not, e.g., “X, not Y”)
No, the link goes to the “Western Philosophy” section (see the URL), the first subsection of which happens to be Aristotle.
You might be right that I’m reading too much into what you’ve written. However, I suspect (especially given the other comments in this thread and the comments on the reddit thread) that the reading “Philosophy is overwhelmingly bad and should be killed with fire,” is the one that readers are most likely to actually give to what you’ve written. I don’t know whether there is a good way to both (a) make the points you want to make about improving philosophy education and (b) make the stronger reading unlikely.
I’m curious: if you couldn’t have your whole mega-course (which seems more like the basis for a degree program than the basis for a single course, really), what one or two concrete course offerings would you want to see in every philosophy program? I ask because while I may not be able to change my whole department, I do have some freedom in which courses I teach and how I teach them. If you are planning to cover this in more detail in upcoming posts, feel free to ignore the question here.
Also, I did understand what you were up to with the Spirtes reference, I just thought it was funny. I tried to imagine what the world would have had to be like for me to have been surprised by finding out that Spirtes was the lead author on Causation, Prediction, and Search, and that made me smile.
Yes; hopefully I can do better in my next post.
One course I’d want in every philosophy curriculum would be something like “The Science of Changing Your Mind,” based on the more epistemically-focused stuff that CFAR is learning how to teach to people. This course offering doesn’t exist yet, but if it did then it would be a course which has people drill the particular skills involved in Not Fooling Oneself. You know, teachable rationality skills: be specific, avoid motivated cognition, get curious, etc. — but after we’ve figured out how to teach these things effectively, and aren’t just guessing at which exercises might be effective. (Why this? Because Philosophy Needs to Trust Your Rationality Even Though It Shouldn’t.)
Though it doesn’t yet exist, if such a course sounds as helpful to you as it does to me, then you could of course try to work with CFAR and other interested parties to try to develop such a course. CFAR is already working with Nobel laureate Saul Perlmutter at Berkeley to develop some kind of course on rationality, though I don’t have the details. I know CFAR president Julia Galef is particularly passionate about the relevance of trainable rationality skills to successful philosophical practice.
What about courses that could e.g. be run from existing textbooks? It is difficult to suggest entry-level courses that would be useful. Aaronson’s course Philosophy and Theoretical Computer Science could be good, but it seems to require significant background in computability and complexity theory.
One candidate might be a course in probability theory and its implications for philosophy of science — the kind of material covered in the early chapters of Koller & Friedman (2009) and then Howson & Urbach (2005) (or, more briefly, Yudwkosky 2005).
Another candidate would be a course on experimental philosophy, perhaps expanding on Alexander (2012).
I am interested. Should I contact Julia directly or is there something else I should do in order to get involved?
Also, since you mention Alexander’s book, let me make a shameless plug here: Justin Sytsma and I just finished a draft of our own introduction to experimental philosophy, which is under contract with Broadview and should be in print in the next year or so.
I look forward to your book with Sytsma! Yes, contact Julia directly.
Is this an open invitation? Because such a course sounds even more helpful to me than it does to you, I suspect. I probably have a lot of catching up, learning and de-corrupting to do on myself before I’m at a level that would be useful rather than waste CFAR’s* time, though.
As a point of reference, I’ve recently been shifting my life goals towards the objective of reducing and understanding “knowledge” and “expertise” as quantifiable, reduced atomic units that can be discussed, acquired and evaluated on the same level of detail and precision as, say, electronic equipment or construction machinery is currently for IT businesses or construction contractors.
I suspect my best path towards this is through an in-depth analytic study of inferential distance and the interlocking of concepts into ideas, and how this could be fully reduced into units of knowledge and information such that it would always be clear, visible and obvious to a tutor exactly which specific units are required to get from A to B on a certain topic, and easy to evaluate which one is lacking in a student.
However, while people are often impressed with just the above statements, I cringe at the fact that I can only say it, and am only grasping at straws and vague mental handles when trying to make sense out of it and actually work on the problem. And it feels almost like an applause light to say this to you, but it seems like everything in this area is… just… going… too… slow… and that really bugs me a lot.
* and those “other interested parties” (Who are they, if you know any examples?)
Of course, you may always contact CFAR about such things. Whether it goes any further than that will vary.
As for “other interested parties,” I recall coming across philosophy and psychology professors who wanted to develop CFAR-like courses for university students, but I don’t recall who they are.
I second that.
Excellent post overall.
I particularly agree with this part. The project of regimenting philosophy to conform to someone’s ideas of correctness or meaningfullness or worth isn’t just objectionably illiberal, although it is, it is counterporductive, because you need some disciple that houses the weirdos. If none of them do, then those leftfield ideas are going to slip through the cracks.